The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
Modern computing technology has brought in a new era of rapid real-time analysis of sports activities. Whether it's a viewer watching a game for leisure, a coach analyzing plays to adapt to the opposing team's strategy, or a general manager compiling data sets across multiple games to optimize player retention strategies, real-time analysis enables thorough quantitative game analysis by granting the viewer instantaneous access to statistical data of every single play. Sport analytics have seen uses in applications such as broadcasting, game strategizing, and team management, yet real-time analytic systems for mass mainstream usage is still complex and expensive. Real-time tracking technology based on image recognition often requires use of multiple high-definition cameras mounted on top of a game area or play field for capturing visual data from multiple camera arrays positioned at multiple perspectives, calibration for different environments, and massive processing power in high-end desktop and/or server-grade hardware to analyze the data from the camera arrays. Accurate tracking of key events throughout the game, such as identifying key players involved in point or shot attempts, identifying location of such attempts, and recognizing the results of such attempts, requires vast resources including expensive equipment with complicated setups that prevent mass adaptation of both real-time and off-line sports analytic systems implemented with low-cost, general-purpose hardware having small form factors.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to easily and accurately detect key events in ball game plays including individual practices and team games, to track relevant shot attempts and locations, identify the ball and players, understand their motions, generate play analytics, and provide relevant tracking and analytical results to viewers in an efficient manner. In addition, it would be an advancement in the state of the art of ball shot and game play analysis to render real-time game plays with high visual fidelity, and to automatically understand different ball courts and perform self-calibration with minimal user input, while maintaining minimal delay and data transfer overheads, such that the entire system can be implemented on a single mobile computing device, such as a smartphone or a tablet.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.